Very bad, my user data was removed too!

snapd
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I am very angry because a removal of a snap application deleted all my saved data. Important data for my productivity now is gone!
How someone can develop an application that by default deletes the user data too?
I just wanted to remove that snap application because some trouble with the version. I wanted a more recent version but wanted to try removing it first and as a surprise when I installed the newer version there are no data at all.

Nothing asked me for the user data deletion! But it was automatically removed anyway!!

I am in ext4, I can try to recover the files, but that must not be the default!! The snap removal procedure must ask the user for confirmation if he/she wants to remove the user data too!!

I am angry!! Snap deleted all my data!!

Edit: I rebooted and tried to recover the data but nothing was recoverable. I had no luck with that.

If nobody solves that I will try to not use Snap anymore. It is actually a headache because it consumes a lot of disk space and makes a lot of mounting points complicating the things. I don’t like Snap because that but I just wanted to give an opportunity. It is a great concept, but please solve that problems because that are not a minor problem. It is very disgusting to work seriously in something using Snap applications because now I know that I can have a risk of losing configuration and user data used by a Snap Application. So, try to solve that urgently.
There are “better” alternatives that don’t do a anoying thing like that.

The Snap Application that I was using is SuperProductivity. And I lost all my time tracking, all my proyects configurations, I lost all of all, including the backups that the App itself did.
That is unnacceptable. Please, take it seriously because I cannot trust in some that is so risky with my data. Only uninstalling the App deleted all that data. That is very bad.

Now I lost my time tracking so I cannot do follow of my already done work. I need to start again. But I cannot estimate the time spent for my works. That just pissed me off.

That cannot happen again. A lot of time tracking lost. So now how I can traduce that as money? How to tell my clients how many time I spent in the work?

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I’m sorry you’ve had a bad experience with snap remove deleting your user data. We are indeed aware that the current implementation results in data removal when snaps are removed. This is terribly unfortunate timing for you as the latest release of snapd - 2.39 - which is due out very soon - resolves this issue.

“With automatic snapshots feature landed and to be released with 2.39, snapd now creates a snapshot of the snap data and configuration automatically on snap remove and keeps it around for 31 days by default.”

Sadly this doesn’t help you with the situation you’re in. The best thing I can recommend is that you restore the specific ~/snap/superproductivity directory from your backups, and then re-install the snap. This will re-instate the system as it was when you took the system backup.

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Thank you for your reply. That gives me hope. But curiously I am using Ubuntu 19.04 just to be updated avoiding troubles like that because outdated applications. But neither updated I can be free of trouble. LOL

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Same angry here. As a professor, I lost my Zoom recordings on an ext4 filesystem. Using Snap 2.49.2 on Debian 10.

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Hi, can you detail how you lost access to your data through the zoom snap? Note that you say you are using snapd 2.49.2, which does include automatic snapshots, so you should be able to see saved snapshots with snap saved, does that command return anything for you?

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Oh… now I understand why snap takes so much time removing an application! I thought my hard drive was failing, instead. I had no idea it was saving application states.

Yes, the snap saved command showed me a saved state of zoom. I found the snap restore <id> command, and I was able to recover my recordings. Non-ending thanks ijohnson!

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just a sidenote here, while snapshots are taken by default when removing a snap nowadays, there are indeed situations where you dont want to preserve the user data … to achieve that you can explicitly use the --purge switch to the snap remove command like:

sudo snap remove --purge mysnap

then the removal will not produce any snapshots (and will also work faster :slight_smile: )

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